Purple Glow
by sunshinetina
Summary: The story is a sequel of the amazing short-movie 'Sea Wall', written by Simon Stephens and brilliantly played by Andrew Scott. - Four years after Lucy's death, there is new beginning for Alex and Helen.


**PURPLE GLOW**

I stand there absolutely breathless, unable even to blink. The hole inside my stomach – the one I've been talking for years now – is so gone, that it stinks of stagnant water and dust, burning the insides of me. It's gone and it's there – it will always be there to remind me how damn lonely I am and how damn lonely I would be for the rest of my life.

My dreams had me for the last few months – captured in the surrealism of a world that would never be achieved, through the pinkness of the beauty of a life that would never be reached. Sometimes I stretch my hand, feeling an odd pain right above my elbow, to touch something I am perfectly well aware does not exist. But then I stop – at the middle of nowhere, at the point that I can't go further or deeper, but can't go back either. So, my hand just lingers there, forgotten by everyone else and by me, above all.

Anything I've ever wanted is here with me.

You know, probably, these could have been my words some – how many? – years ago. Not now.

My hand still lingers there – in the shallowness of the empty darkened room, with a mirror dangerously hanging from the ugly wall, painted in blistered orange. I remember choosing the fruity colour for Lucy and Helen – they did or did not like it, I can't remember – but I know I adored it. Now I can't even stand it – thanks God we are leaving this episode of our lives behind.

Helen is standing in front of the mirror, tying her hair in an awfully ugly pony tail, in a hurry not to miss her cab, though she is already terribly late. Her gray-greenish suitcase is right next to her – not too heavy, for she is able perfectly well to handle it by herself. I won't stand up, I won't reach for her, and I won't run after her or after the cab. I've done this tenths of times. There is a point in human's life when one can't repeat the same thing over and over again and just gives up. I think I've reached that point.

Every time I try to stop her, she yells at me and blames me for the stinking hole in my-...

She told me once that I was a desperate person looking for something that was never mine. Can you imagine that? 'Running after a dream of an illusionary world that can't be created now', she told me once or twice... or fucking three times, I can't remember!

All I ever wanted was for both of them to be happy. And Arthur too.

I guess, 'happiness' is such an empty word now. A symbol, rather than a meaning. How can one be happy if everything that has ever brought happiness to him is buried six feet under? Literally?

I was never happy, to be honest. I just thought... I was just thinking I was happy.

When Lucy was born, I was looking at her pretty angel eyes, and was talking to her endlessly – day and night, sometimes without even interrupting myself. Helen was feeding and bathing her while I was constantly talking, sometimes even repeating myself (what am I even saying – 'sometimes'? always!); and I knew – by the blinks of those weary eyes, that she was listening to me, she understands, she wants to know more. She has always been like that – desperate for knowledge. Maybe that's why she's created a parallel universe of her own – she was not playing with her Barbies with fake tan and odd limbs. She was the Mistress of her own realm. I guess I'll never know what kind of kingdom she's created – she never brought me there, despite my pleadings.

I think she was locked in her fortress that day.

She was defending herself when she fe-... From-... Yeah. The rock.

I happened to visit France twice recently. Work. Taking pictures of the vivid landscapes where human being just can't survive. I was pleased to hear that a famous couple wanted me for their wedding photographer. Initially, I refused – it was too soon. Then I thought about the possibility over and over again. Helen was the one who dissuaded me. The French woman was pregnant. During that time, Helen was still with me.

I remember, Helen once told me that to be an artist, a person should be able to make art from every single God-forbidden thing; so I asked her, 'Are you like Arthur – believing in God?'

'No,' she said, 'I am talking now about art, not about God.'

'But you've mentioned God, so you must be thinking of-...'

I was drunk that day. Can't remember whether I got drunk after the talk, during it, or before – I just remember I was headless the other day.

The 'God talks' disgust me now. Every time someone mentions His name, I got involuntarily confused and scared at the same time, but subconsciously putting a fierce mask of rejection and disapproval.

Arthur stopped talking about God and faith too. Not because of me but because of Lucy – he couldn't explain to himself the very nature of God's philosophy to take with Himself a flawless child's soul like Lucy's. His knowledge reached only to the point of 'God takes with Himself only the best and kindest people in this world.' Ridiculous.

Sometimes I miss her more than my own breathing. Then I start thinking that the world could have been the other way around if it was me on this rock and her in the sea. Cause now, every time I close my eyes, I see hers, and my hand still lingers in the fetid air, trying to touch her bushy hair but without any successful result. I believe that if faith teaches us something unreasonably beautiful – though, beyond any logic and proof – is that the dead are always with you and can touch you, hug you, caress you. I want to feel her. I know that she can kiss me on the cheek now and tell me that I should shave cause I prick her lips slightly with my week-old beard; and that she would wrap her hands around my tummy and press her warm forehead over it. Right where the hole is. This is why I want to swap places with her – even for a day. If God exists – I know he doesn't but it is good sometimes to believe in things like that... If God exists, he would allow me to be dead and for her to live. It's ok to be separated – I am already used to it. But I need to touch her.

Helen told me recently that she misses the smell of her hair, and I told her that I miss the touch of her baby skin. I was a total wreck before – I could have cried for hours if a couple like us was talking things like that on the movie screen. I was not even slightly moved by my own words, though.

When Helen told me she can't take it anymore, I felt my whole world hopelessly scattering down and me – a crushed, beheaded insect-creature – unable to move my body, to lift it up, and to stop her. I knew – I've always known – that every beginning has an end. But there is a tiny-tiny minority of people who even dare to realise that every end has a beginning. Cause Lucy's life had a beginning, right? A very powerful, breath-taking beginning.

Maybe, I deserved such and ending – no one would ever know, even the non-existing God.

Lucy would have laughed – she always did so when I was starting to get too philosophical or sentimental.

She liked to play games with Arthur and me. She was good at 'Cities and Countries', though – the game we used to play when there was a sudden stop of the electricity in the house, which was very often, I may say.

'D,' I would say and she would chuckle, putting her small hand with the tiniest fingers and the sweatiest palm, on her pink lips. David was the first-grader neighbour she used to like.

'Denver,' started Arthur – always with the big cities in the America Lucy has always been dreaming of.

'Dallas,' I would second, noticing how Lucy moves her head back and forth, left and right, with a stupid childish frown on her face.

'Dublin,' would exclaim Lucy and would clap with her small hands enthusiastically, leaving me biting my tongue. At that time Helen was working in Dublin and was earning a fair amount of money, to be honest; she was insisting on our family to go there too. Arthur refused, though – too many years spent amongst the Irish left him way too many memories, most of them better to be deeply forgotten about.

Lucy adored Irish accent. She was pretty good with that too – like, she was good at anything she has ever considered doing. Like mother, like daughter, I have to say. She managed to do such a perfect Dubliner accent, without even being able to visit it, so I was beginning to wonder whether she was my daughter or of some Irish colleague of Helen's.

Lucy always got angry when I was saying this. So she started showing me – this, and that, and this – eyes, lips, chins – and told me, 'Look at my freckle here; and my deep black eyes; and my strange devilish smile – all yours, papa!' – and I got all sentimental and bloody ridiculous, and whispered repeatedly that she is my precious daughter only.

When I've got to hug her, I thought that I was hugging the whole world – with its endless seas and oceans, with its rough mountains, and greenest hills. She was in my arms – trembling and loving, with all her childish mood changes and womanish diversities – proudly talking to me about her recent achievements in school; and I was looking at her as though it was the first time I was seeing her – immensely cherishing the fact that I was discovering her over and over again.

People often do miss the slightest detail that while we are hugging someone, we are hugging ourselves too. And when they are gone, we continue embracing our limbs and bones, but that is just not enough because the presence between our chest and the heavy air surrounding us is empty and is now filled with our fear only.

Fear is actually the best and the single most often felt... feeling that one could ever fully sense present. Fear is always around and inside of us; marking our lives from the moment we take our first breath till the very last one when we close our eyes. It's with us in the morning till the evening; even when we think we are sleeping. It's like a huge hound, watching and suppressing us with its paws.

I am afraid Helen would never stop looking back at us. And this is what makes this hole even more stinking and invisibly deeper than before. She has stopped blaming me, though I was to blame and to be hanged; but she just left, with this look in her eyes, like saying, 'I don't know what I would do with you from now on,' and I beg her, kneel before her, desperate not to be left alone, but she just leaves with this ugly green suitcase of hers – always too small to gather all her amazing dresses that make her the single most beautiful living creature in this whole world.

I would have loved her till the very last moment of my life and continue loving her after my death too. She cut it off, without giving me the single chance of me saying how she completes every missing piece of my life-puzzle and certainly before hearing me say that the hole in my stomach would corrode my heart and veins now, as she leaves.

The door-slam is so barely heard, that I think she is still in the room – sensing her fragrance so well-known, seeing her silhouette so hardly-to-be-forgotten. She is here and there – in my life and out of it – the dream that I was blessed to live in and that was taken away from me with one involuntary movement.

I would like to tell her that my puzzle is falling apart now but I get confused – is it the puzzle or is it me who is destroying himself slowly, piece by piece?

To be a photographer, one should know the difference between destruction and scattering – and I claim to know it pretty well – but I've never been educated for a self-destruction. The best shots are while a life is born and when a life is fading away, so I wish someone to put a camera above the ghostly mirror on the orange wall and to film how my life is slowly leaving my body.

'Only God knows when to take you away,' says Arthur.

'But then, what happens when I feel I am ready?' is my question which is left without a single response but by a shrug, the most.

And the talk about God happens once again, just to be finished by a rattle and by some swearing, most probably.

We weren't like that before – Arthur and I. We did not like to have quarrels – if one of us happened to disagree with the other – we just used to shut up temporarily, just to sort our nerves out.

'God will forgive you.'

But there's nothing God would ever even try to forgive _me_ because I am not the one to blame. Am I?

'What about China?' he asks when I mention to him that he was reading a bloody book about the history or something of China when Lucy was-...

But he doesn't answer – he just blinks, taking a sip of his _Evian_ with loads of ice and lemon. Everything is French to him – even the water; even after all this time.

When he died, I thought that Helen was not crying for him but for Lucy, though she was insisting that now she was completely alone in this world, while trying to press me towards her body as close as possible. Two days after the funeral, she did her first leave.

Every time she walks out that door, I drink a full of ice glass of _Jamieson_ – bloody Irish! – trying to remember the reasons for her giving up. And – believe me, there is not a single one, except-...

I remember that I was praying to... someone – I don't know whom to – to save Helen from the worst. Because without a child we can survive somehow, but without her I definitely can't. I think I've already told someone that – I keep forgetting myself these days, losing my conscience somewhere in the studio.

Doesn't matter. The thing is that I miss her so much when she leaves me, that I think someone has grabbed my heart and has ripped it out of my chest – right through that stinking hole in my stomach.

And she is so beautiful as she leaves! Dear me, how beautiful she is! And the thought of her being my-... That she was my-... That she was the mother of my-...

Helen was the single shore of my ocean.

And every time I happen to lay my eyes on the door she is so used to slam, I ask myself, 'What would God do now, if he existed? Would he laugh? Would he cry? Would he pour Himself a good drink and get wasted?'

Now, see – don't get me wrong: I am desperately trying to get rid of the thought of God Arthur has so well planted in my naive mind. Sometimes it does work but mostly it's just there – teasing and torturing me inside out.

God doesn't exist. But there is this strange power that every person believes in. Some call it 'God'; some prefer the terms 'force', 'coincidence', 'luck', etc. I come somewhere in-between.

For the years we've spent together, Arthur was unable to give me just one single description of God; so, even though I was verging on the thought of starting to actually believe in God's existence, I got quite confused about his looks and appearances, which made my efforts utterly useless, since I can't imagine the object of my faith.

'He may be something like Santa Claus,' says Lucy and I smile as she giggles at her own suggestion.

'Maybe,' nods Arthur, 'because no one has even seen him but the people with the strongest belief – the children, know he is there.'

'And he brings us gifts!'

'And He brings us the best gift of them all – life.'

I can see Lucy is very confused now – her stupid frown on her face again, as she pouts her lips in desperate need to understand what is going on. I can't help but laugh cause I myself don't fully understand the situation.

Lucy has never been like me – she is just like Helen. I mean, everyone can see that she is my absolute copy – even Helen – but only Lucy and I know this is not quite true. The concave black eyes and the chubby nose are not enough. Her manners and her angelic voice and laugh are just like Helen's. That's why sometimes I use to close my eyes and just listen to Helen talking on the phone with a friend or colleague of hers.

When she comes back, this is the only thing I long for – hearing her talk, listening to her sweet voice. And she does so – sometimes she is yelling at me for breaking the best years of her life, sometimes she is apologetically whispering in my ear with the top of her tongue masterfully playing with my ear shell, knowingly giving me orgasmic tickles.

This lasts two or three weeks before the next door-slamming, as she curses the day she met me.

In nights like this, I believe in the coincidental God force like no other.

Maybe, he has a beard or a moustache? Or maybe he uses _Gillette_ or something else, and he is perfectly shaved? Is he young or old? Is he tall, thin, fit? Does he have a six-pack or he is eating quite a lot?

And I realise that while standing behind the camera, trying to capture the steady creatures in the landscape, I am thinking about some ridiculous things that most certainly do not have any place in my already disturbed life.

So, I am trying to laugh at myself but what comes out of my mouth is the sound of a dead seal in the Arctic Ocean – forgotten and forbidden by everything and everyone. With doors slammed in its face.

And Helen comes back, embraces me, kisses me, we make love. And I can sense the touch of her lingerie and her skin; cup her perfectly shaped breasts; and bite her long neck. I can take her virginity over and over again, hearing her moan in my ear, while screaming and whispering my name.

At some point Lucy comes in our room, interrupting us while we make love, making Helen realise she is too loud and bringing salty tears in her eyes. We stop, we are confused, Helen leaves.

Taking a picture is just like killing someone – one shot and it is done: you sometimes wish to change it and you do so but the initial shot is always there – bloody and ugly, part of your past. You can delete it but you can never erase it.

Lucy told me once that she liked the photos where she was not smiling. I tried my best to make her laugh and I did succeed for one photo. She liked it the best, so from now on she was always smiling. I think, the smile she has is the only thing in her looks she got from Helen – the most beautiful and innocent smile one could ever imagine.

I know that Helen would eventually come back – this is what I keep saying to myself every time she leaves. Cause I keep finding some of her favourite clothes scattered around unimaginable corners of the house – she just can't leave them here.

And she always comes back, indeed. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we don't. Sometimes she packs her bags to walk out of that so well-memorised door (I've changed the poor old hinges, after the third leaving). Sometimes we make up for an hour, and smile at each other.

When she told me she was planning to make an abortion, I was happy. Because she was finally getting rid of all the deadly emotions stacked up in her. She was not ready for an abortion, of course, and I knew that bloody well.

'After all, I would have someone in this world,' she told me once it was too late. And I was mad and I was happy, and I believed in God! Or whatever it was that gave us this.

Helen becomes more and more beautiful and amazing with every single second of every single minute of every single hour. And the sight of the ring shining on her finger while she is cooking my favourite sauté is what makes me adore her even more, if that is possible.

The feeling of her bulgy tummy against my shivering palm is the single most moving sensation in this whole bloody universe, I swear. Sometimes the thingy there moves, sometimes it rests. It likes Classical music and good old movies – like _Casablanca_. Helen fears it would become another copy of mine – addicted to art and everything. Because – you know – every time when I go behind the camera, the tummy is speeding up, like it is in a rush to get out and to come with me.

I've become a total wreck again – I thought I was unable to cry but I was so totally, totally wrong. With every tear I shed now, I feel the hole inside of me filling up. It no longer stinks. Neither do I.

When the midwife shows her to me, I can't see her properly.

'What? The pink or the blue one?'

'Oh God, the purple one!'

'They all are purple!'

And ugly. If someone tells you that the babies are beautiful – they are not. They are small, and devilish-like and most certainly not beautiful. The Mums hyperbolise a bit, I presume. Like, a lot.

But she is the most purple of all the purple babies and she is smiling and waving at me. 'It's impossible – she is just a newborn,' they say but I don't believe them.

I wish I had my camera with me for all the important moments in my life. Even without being a photographer, every person, I think, has such a desire. We all want to capture the most vivid moments in our lives, as to make them live forever. Our birth, our childhood, our graduation, prom, wedding, the birth of our children, even our death. Even so, however, we still miss something – the peak point in every single one of those occasions. There is this thing we can never capture in a picture – this is what would live in our memories only.

We name her Tiffany – Helen felt the contractions while we were re-re-re-watching _Breakfast at Tiffany's_. As I scan the dictionary with the English names' meanings, I find that Tiffany actually means 'revelation of God' and I can't help but smile and laugh and cry. If God did not exist, would he have ever considered the possibility of giving me the best gift ever? Life? Called Tiffany?

She is just gorgeous. She is not purple anymore, although Helen does tend to insist on her wearing pink and purple clothes. She is right, though – she is so pretty and cute, that those colours fit her amazingly well. She is innocent and very, very, awfully clever. After all, a baby girl whose first word is 'Daddy' should be awfully clever, right?

We go to Dublin. Helen did her best to renew her job there and we leave the dirty London for a life in the shire, not quite even realising that Dublin could be huge and devastating too. Not the best place for a baby to be brought up in but it's a start.

She is nothing like me. Tiffany, I mean. She is just like Helen. She still has the chubby nose and the big black holes on her round face, called eyes. She is giggling – a laugh from angels' heaven – sending me chills all over my spine. She is so beautiful, though – she can't be like me. All her sweet talks and her vivid descriptions of what she wants and how she wants it (at this very instant) are killing me of Helen's mannerism and of childish fluffiness.

I love her more than my life. I've once chosen to depart from it, I can easily do it twice. And as my eyes instinctively fall on Helen's, a single nod is enough for me to understand that Helen would sacrifice anything for Tiffany. She is our only shore now – in a whole ocean of sinking holes which don't exist anymore.

You've probably noticed the change in me since the last time we've had a talk. Here... it's not present anymore, is it? People come around me and say there is a glow – a strange purple glow – coming from there now. Is it? I am amazed how quick a person can change.

I am seriously starting to consider that God has a finger in this.

We've been in Dublin for six months or so now. We are good, we are settling down.

If we can survive through this, we can survive through anything.

I remember saying something like that four years ago. Doesn't matter. It's in the past. One should not think about their past but focus on their present only – without the future. Future kills, future drains. It is useless.

There are moments in one's life when there is a need for us to stop and think about how and where we are heading at. This is when we realise that most of the time we are heading towards an empty space of nothing – the delusion of our own persistent dreams which simply do not exist and never will. This is when we give up grasping the desperate and impossible idea of living a life we can't even lay the first brick of. The moment to actually _live_ comes in – through that same slammed door with the new hinges. And to live is the best thing one could ever do.

Helen moves around the house.

I am trying to think about the photo-shoot I need to do for the third birthday of the neighbours' child. I can't – the thoughts are overwhelming me in a wild competitive rush. The purple glow is embracing and even strangling me. Too much sadness kills a person; too much happiness can make him dead whilst living.

I don't want to think about the photo-shoot. I don't want to think about myself either. I don't want to think at all. When you start thinking too much, you lose the pleasure of living. And it is the only thing that could make us live – the pleasure of a life yet to be experienced.

Just because we think this is the end, it doesn't mean it actually is. It only means we've reached a point in our lives we _think_ is the end. It is not. Every end has a new beginning.

-END-


End file.
